Maja Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present La belva che sei (The beast that you are), a solo exhibition by Elisa Abela marking the artist’s first collaboration with the gallery, curated by Matteo Di Castro.

The exhibition opens on Thursday 15 January at 6 pm at Via di Monserrato 30, Rome, featuring approximately thirty works, including a selection of works on paper from 2020–2022 and a new body of paintings on canvas from 2025.

Animals are the undisputed protagonists of the exhibition: a small bestiary that ranges from the domestic to the wild, from air to water, encompassing even the most unexpected creatures. Autonomous and solitary figures, bearers of an irreducible presence, emerge from the surface of the paintings as alter egos, mirrors, and counterpoints to our human condition.

The decision to work with the animal subject runs through this body of work as a specific field of inquiry, not symbolic in the strict sense. Abela’s animals do not represent types or established allegories, but singular presences, removed from group dynamics and from any narrative hierarchy. Within this condition of isolation and suspension of roles and functions, the artist identifies a space of proximity: a form of unmediated observation in which the animal is not called upon to “say” something, but simply to be.

The exhibition title reprises one of the phrases that accompany the works, La belva che sei, and points to a recurring practice within this series: the inclusion of brief texts that accompany or traverse the images. These are neither captions nor explanatory comments, but essential statements, at times formulated in the second person, which enter into a relationship with the figure without closing down its meaning. The words do not explain or guide the image; rather, they constitute an additional layer—a threshold of resonance that remains open to the experience of looking.

La belva che sei does not point to an identity to be revealed, but to a multiplicity to be traversed: a field of presences in continuous transformation.